Museu Coleccao Berardo in Lisbon Opens PHotoEspaña 2011 with a Show by Alfredo Jaar

LISBON.- The exhibition by Alfredo Jarr was presented in a press conference at Museu Colecção Berardo at Lisbon. The exhibition is under the Official Section of PHotoEspaña 2011 Interfaces, Portraiture and Communication.

A Hundred Times Nguyen, focused in the girl Nguyen whom the artist met at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, is the protagonist of an installation in which the image of her face is repeated over and over again.

The work purports to reflect on the distant effect of news reports, and it explores the widening distance between the Third World and the developing countries. The exhibition is on view from May 27 through August 26, 2011.

The girld Nguyen, whom Alfredo Jaar met at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, is the protagonist of an installation in which her face is repeated over and over again.The work strives to explore the distancing effect of news reports, and it delves into Jaar’s preoccupation with the distancing between the Third World and the developed countries.

The work of Alfredo Jaar is characterized by its commitment to history and by its meditation on the distance between the Third World and developing countries. A Hundred Times Nguyen (1994) is an installation comprising four portraits of a girl named Nguyen, whom Alfredo Jaar met in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. The portraits of the girl are repeated multiple times in varying orders until the images reach 100 iterations. The installation strives to convey the distant and disinterested effect of news reports, which the artist himself describes as “a landscape of media full of thousands of images where all of them fight to capture our attention, and most of the time they ask to consume, consume, consume.”

The artist
Alfredo Jaar (Chile, 1956) is an architect, filmmaker, and visual artist. He has participated in Biennials in Venice (1986, 2007), São Paolo (1987, 1989), Sydney (1990), Istanbul (1995), Kwangju (1995, 2002), Johannesburg (1997), and Seville (2006), as well as the Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). He has shown individually at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Whitechapel in London, the Modern Museet of Stockholm, the Fundación Teléfonica in Santiago, Chile, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, and the Hangar Bicocca of Milan, among other places. He is the author of over 50 public art works worldwide, and over 35 monographs have been written about his work.

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